I had a good time with these doodles; I always do have a good time doodling. I don’t know exactly why it takes traveling all the way to Europe for me to actually do something I enjoy so much. Well, I guess the obvious reason that, I’m usually not working when I’m in Paris, and when I’m in New York, I usually am working. Funny what a little bit of free time can do for one’s more artistic pursuits.
Smaller and Smaller
Towards the end of my trip, and my sketching, I started working smaller and smaller (the sketches below are not shown in order, nor are they shown to scale with one another), and enjoying it more and more. There’s something about working at a reduced scale that’s very satisfying, and if I had to put my finger on it, I think it’s the idea that every line matters more, and yet there’s less cost to messing up a drawing.
Working small forces me to be more efficient with my lines, and make every one of them count — it practically prohibits superfluous embellishments. But if I botch a drawing, then no harm and no foul — I’ve only wasted a handful of pen marks and a fraction of a single page in my sketchbook. It’s kind of the diametric opposite of the complex, contingent and sometimes plodding world of Web design. Which can be nice.